A number of home electric appliances today are provided with a remote control device (remote controller) to allow operation at a distance from a user.
However, since each home electric appliance has its own remote controller, several controllers dedicated to a home electric appliance must be used, which is inconvenient.
Further, some users wish to manipulate the home electric appliance in their private homes when outside the home such that an air conditioner can be made to start in advance while outside of the home by a user in order to have a comfortable environment when reaching home.
On the other hand, at present, mobile terminals carrying an interface connectable with both a wide area communication network such as a cellular phone communication network and a local area network such as wireless LAN (Local Area Network) are provided. They have been wide spread and is becoming a main stream as a mobile terminal.
Under such a circumstance, Japanese Unexamined Patent Application Publication No. 2009-49654 discloses a handy server having a telephone conversation/communication function to connect with a telephone terminal or a site on the network via a cellular phone communication network or a wireless LAN network and a remote control function to communicate with a home electric appliance having a near-field wireless communication function to remotely control the home electric appliance.
Japanese Unexamined Patent Application Publication No. JP2007-116484 proposes a system in which a cellular phone obtains a remote control code of a home appliance manufacturer to be an operation object from a site via the Internet to transmit a command corresponding to the obtained remote control code to a remote control station. The remote control station converts the command into an infrared signal to operate the electric appliance to be an operation object.
Although the handy server of Japanese Unexamined Patent Application Publication No. 2009-49654 is connectable with a cellular phone communication network or a wireless LAN and includes a remote control function, connectivity with the cellular phone communication network or wireless LAN simply expands the width of available communication network.
In Japanese Unexamined Patent Application Publication No. JP2007-116484, a plurality of home electric appliances can be operated remotely by a single remote control station. However, at the time of simply executing a remote operation instruction received from a mobile terminal, no response can be possibly taken when dangerous conditions should occur in a home due to behavior of the home electric appliance by the operation. For example, when receiving an operation of a heater and the like from outside of the home to execute it, the occurrence of an unanticipated situation would be difficult to cope with if nobody is in the home.
The object of the present invention is, when receiving the operation instruction of an operation object apparatus from a terminal that a user utilizes, to discriminate the kind of a communication network in which the relevant terminal establishes communication and provide a technique to discriminate permission/rejection of the operation according to the kind.